The Global Impact of the Pandemic on Institutional and Community Corrections: Assessing Short-Term Crisis Management and Long-Term Change Strategies

Abstract

This introduction discusses the global impact of Covid-19 on corrections. By many standards, the United States has more individuals under some form of correctional supervision – but especially in jails and prisons – than any other high income countries. On any given day, there are 2.3 million people behind bars (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020) and another 4.5 million under community supervision (Jones, 2018). Each year in the US, over 600,000 incarcerated people are released from American prisons (Bronson & Carson, 2019). Nearly 11 million filter in and out of local jails (Zeng, 2020); that amount of individuals is roughly the size of the daily New York City population or the entire state of Ohio. There are over 400,000 people employed as correctional officers and jailers (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020); this does not include administrative, medical, and service staff and other vendors. The U.S. spends billions of dollars a year locking people up. In just 45 states in 2015, the state prison systems collectively spent 43 USD billion (Mai & Subramanian, 2017), a number that does not include local county jails, or federal prisons and detention centers. The U.S. comprises about 4% of the world population, but 25% of the world’s incarcerated population, and 25% of the world’s COVID-19 cases. These intertwining epidemics are not surprising given that the US has among the highest levels of inequality (OECD Center for Opportunity and Equality, n.d.) and lowest levels of life expectancy (Ho & Hendi, 2018) compared to other high-income countries, as well as high levels of racial inequality, which are also apparent in the prison (The Sentencing Project, 2018) and COVID-19 epidemics (Wortham et al., 2020).